BACKGROUND:

Endoscopy constitutes one of the greatest advances in the diagnosis of pulmonary diseases. It has been considered a safe procedure because complication index is very low, these being related with the procedure, the disease of origin, and the management of the anesthesia.

OBJECTIVE:

To describe frequency and severity of complications of bronchoscopy procedures in children.

MATERIALS AND METHODS:

Transversal descriptive study from March/2006 to December/2014. It included pediatric patients in a tertiary-level hospital, in whom a flexible fiber optic bronchoscopy caused complications that were grouped, to a greater or lesser degree, as physiological, infectious, mechanical, and anesthetic. We report the results with frequencies and percentages for qualitative variables and median and range for quantitative variables.

RESULTS:

The study included 1,059 patients, 648 male (61%), age range 0-192 months; baseline respiratory pathology (n = 842) (80%), diagnostic study (n = 898) (85%), therapeutic study (n = 161) (15%), with minor (n = 69) (6.5%), and major complications (n = 14 (1.5%), the latter only in diagnostic studies. Among minor complications in 55 (5.2%) patients, there was at least one isolated complication, and in 14 (1.3%), >1 complication was present. The following were the most frequent major complications found: arrhythmia (n = 7) (29%), and severe desaturation (n = 7) (29%). Five patients with major complications required resuscitation maneuvers, four patients were admitted to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), and only one required an emergency tracheotomy. There were no deaths.

CONCLUSIONS:

Bronchoscopy is a safe procedure with a low frequency of complications.